Wasting your time with things I find interesting, amusing, or enraging. Reinke does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations

New state employees in California would face a cap on the size of their retirement checks, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said yesterday. They would also have to put in more time on the job than current workers before they collect, he said.

Brown, 74, wants to cut pension benefits and curb abuses before he asks voters in November to raise income and sales taxes. A weak recovery from the longest recession since the 1930s, reducing job prospects and retirement benefits for most nongovernment workers, has churned up a backlash against the pay and benefits of public employees nationwide.

“If voters think that legislators have made a serious policy change, then the chances for the tax increase improve,” said Jack Pitney, who teaches politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. “But if they think it is nothing but window dressing, then chances get a lot worse.”

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He also wanted to raise the retirement age to 67 from 55 for most new state employees.

Rising retiree obligations are straining the budgets of states such as California and cities across the U.S. still grappling with income- and sales-tax revenue slammed by the recession.

California’s state pensions in 2010 had about 81 percent of what they needed to cover the benefits they promised, down from 87 percent in the preceding year, according to an annual study by Bloomberg Rankings. The median for all states was 75 percent, the data show.

Steinberg said the pension changes would save the state “tens of billions of dollars” over the next 20 to 30 years, though he later added that an analysis of the cost savings had yet to be done.

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Sorry, but Gooferment pensions are a vestige of “golden watch” thinking.

No pensions for ordinary people; why should the political class get them.